We’ve shown how the Media Research Center hyped claims that the shooter in a February incident at Joel Osteen’s Houston megachurch was transgender and in league with Hamas — as it turns out the shooter has always identified as female (except when stealing the names of male victims in fraud schemes) and had more of a generalized anti-Semitism combined with mental illness. The MRC wasn’t about to let a good narrative go, no matter how inaccurate, so Jorge Bonilla pushed it again in a Feb. 16 post:
Mass shootings, or at least attempted mass shootings, are the kind of story that the media will run with for days because it helps push a policy item that is at the top of the left’s agenda: gun control. But the story has to sit just right. If any narrative element is off or if new, inconvenient details emerge, then the story has to be pulled. Such is the case with Sunday’s shooting at Lakewood church in Houston, Texas.
You recall the initial details: armed individual wearing a trench coat enters into a church and starts shooting. Off-duty law enforcement, some might call them good guys with a gun, quickly stepped in and neutralized the shooter. Unfortunately, a child was shot in the head and another gentleman was grazed in the leg. Even worse for the media, the inconvenient details began to roll in.
The shooter’s identity was a mystery, with both male and female identities. Which one did the shooter decide upon at the time of the shooting? It appears to have been the female identity. Additionally, the shooter was a migrant. Who may have voted in Texas. The story was going sour even before news of the anti-semitic writings broke. Under these circumstances, the corporate national media have no interest in covering a transgender church shooter.
Again: The shooter isn’t transgender, no matter how much Bonilla wishes that to be. He rattled off a list of things seized from the shooter’s home, then whined that non-right-wing media aren’t covering the story to his satisfaction:
Those are a lot of materials, and perhaps even a manifesto explaining the motive. The national outlets speculated as to the motives of the shooting, but quickly moved on to less inconvenient stories.
It would’ve also been nice to know, for example, about all the times law enforcement was called to the shooter’s home. The national media lost interest in this case as soon as the identity of the shooter was made evident.
What might be in those writings across the assorted electronica seized by law enforcement? Why the extra ammo? What’s on the poster art? A rigorous press might show an interest in covering such things and asking such questions- unfortunately, we haven’t had that in a long time.
Instead we get silence and get shuttled off to the next story.
Speaking of moving on to the next story: When’s the last time you read anything at the MRC about the 2021 school shooting in Oxford, Mich.? In the aftermath of the shooting, the MRC engaged in its usual whining that the massacre was being cited as evidence to the need for more gun regulation and Republicans were being called out for their resistance to any common-sense regulation. (Three students were killed in the massacre; by contrast, only the shooter was killed in the church incident.) When a prosecutor charged the teen shooter’s parents for their role in supplying guns to him and ignoring warning signs, Alex Christy groused that it was suggested that “conservatives would make the parents Second Amendment heroes,” getting defensive about the whole thing: “The parents appear to have ignored clear warnings something was wrong with their son by doing nothing to prevent him from accessing the firearm used in the shooting. No Second Amendment advocate supports such reckless behavior.” The MRC also lionized a school football player who “sacrificed his life to save the lives classmates during the tragic shooting at his school.” The MRC did not highlight any list of items seized from the shooter’s house.
The MRC has had little to say about the shooting and its aftermath since. When the parents were convicted and then sentenced on involuntary manslaughter charges, the MRC remained silent.